2017-03-08 Wed

Six women who fought bravely for their rights, women who are truly worthy of respect were honoured by United Kingdom Post- Royal Mail by issuing a commemorative stamp sheet in their name on 14th October 2008. These women are:

Millicent Garrett Fawcett (11th June 1847 – 5th August 1929) an English feminist, intellectual, political and union leader is primarily known for her work as a campaigner for women to have the right to vote. She also became President of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (the NUWSS) from 1897 to 1919.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (9th June 1836 – 17th December 1917) an English physician and suffragist, was the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon. She was the co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, the first dean of a British medical school, the first female doctor of medicine in France, the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and as a Mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor and magistrate in Britain.

Marie Stopes (15th October 1880 – 2nd October 1958) with her second husband Humphrey Verdon Roe founded the first birth control clinic in Britain on 17th March 1921. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) was controversial and influential which brought the subject of birth control into public discourse. Stopes opposed abortion, arguing that the prevention of conception was all that was needed.

Eleanor Rathbone (12th May 1872 - 2nd January 1946) one of the first women members of the Parliament who published The Case for Family Allowances in 1940, and throughout her political life, she continued to agitate for this reform. In 1945, her efforts were rewarded when a legislation establishing family allowances was passed.

Claudia Jones, (21st February 1915 – 24th December 1964), a Trinidad-born journalist and activist was deported with her family to the US (1955), where she became a political activist and Black Nationalist through Communism. By 1948, she had become the editor of Negro Affairs for the party's paper - the Daily Worker and had evolved as an accomplished speaker on human and civil rights. She founded Britain's first major black newspaper, The West Indian Gazette (1958).

Barbara Castle (6th October 1910 – 3rd May 2002), a British Labor Party politician made history when she intervened in the Ford sewing machinists' strike of 1968, in which women of the Dagenham Ford Plant demanded the same pay as their male counterparts. She helped resolve the strike resulting in a pay rise for Ford's female workers bringing them to 92% of what the men received. Most significantly, as a consequence of this strike, Castle put through the Equal Pay Act 1970.